


This I Know, And Know Full Well

by Ghostinthehouse



Series: Demon and Angel Professors [18]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Professors, Disabled Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 21:27:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20955164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostinthehouse/pseuds/Ghostinthehouse
Summary: Anathema wasn't sure what she'd expected, but a top floor apartment in a blank-faced block, full of books and plants and huge windows, wasn't it.





	This I Know, And Know Full Well

Anathema wasn't sure what she'd expected, but a top floor apartment in a blank-faced block, full of books and plants and huge windows, wasn't it. Dr Crowley waved her towards a battered armchair, sank down into an equally battered sofa and let his head fall back. She also wasn't sure what she'd expected from either of them. What little she had heard had been decidedly odd, and Dr Fell, when she met him, decidedly odder, down to the weird first name. Not that she had any room to talk there. She had rather assumed Dr Fell's dear Anthony would be like him. Soft, and sweet, and gently kind. Instead, he was this rude, grumpy, closed-off man, all angles, limbs, drama, and red hair. And yet...seen together, their combined aura of love was painfully bright.

Dr Fell - Aziraphale - returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea, a mug of coffee, and a plate of cake, set them on the centre table, and took his seat on the sofa beside his husband.

Said husband sat up enough to take the coffee and somehow ran a hand over his face without dislodging the dark glasses. "Ok, let's get this over with. I'm _not_ going to go into details. I've seen..." He hesitated and something complicated and unreadable flickered across his face before he settled for, "...a lot. Much of it less than good. Short version. I hung out with the wrong crowd in my younger and more innocent days, asked the wrong questions, and when everything went down, I took the Fall along with them." He stretched out his long legs with a wince and slouched back against the seat. "Then, of course, I had the unforgivable gall to go and fall in love with someone from - the other side of the tracks - and he had the temerity to love me back, Romeo and Juliet style. Real snake in the grass, I was there. Corrupter of the innocent and all that. There are still people - Gabriel's one of them - who are never going to see me as anything else."

"I wasn't," Aziraphale put in rather tartly, "as innocent as some like to make out."

"'Course you weren't, angel." Anthony draped an arm behind Aziraphale's shoulders. "You knew _exactly_ what you were doing when you sidled up in that bar and went 'Let me tempt you...?'"

She was sure there was more to it than that, but maybe it fell under "details".

Aziraphale chuckled. "Almost every year, the first-years get the wrong idea about us. We generally let them, at least for a while, so you'll very likely hear lots of strange rumours about us."

"I have a reputation to maintain," Anthony said. His body language shifted with unsettling abruptness as he dropped the mask and grinned, exposing laughter lines she hadn't realised existed. "Nasty, evil, vicious, demonic Dr Crowley that I am. Obviously nothing like angelic Dr Fell's _Dear Anthony._"

Anathema echoed feebly, "Obviously," because without the masks he looked - warm, kind, sweet, almost gentle. The differences were only at surface level. Rushing current versus meandering backwater, but all the same river in the end.

Aziraphale smiled fondly. "We don't set them up. We're just ourselves, and they assume. After all, we have nothing apparently in common."

"They often take us for enemies," Anthony said. He quoted tenderly,

"'I do not like thee, Dr Fell.

The reason why I cannot tell,

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not _like_ thee, Dr Fell.'" He filled the whole of that last line with warmth, and with the promise that "like" was entirely too mild a word for what he felt.

"_Do_ you have anything in common?" she heard herself ask.

They both laughed.

Anthony said, "More than anyone'd ever believe."

Aziraphale softened, leaning into Anthony's arm. "If we didn't have it in common to start with, we built it together. It's in common now."

"Took us a while, but we got there in the end."

**Author's Note:**

> "I do not like thee Dr Fell" is an English nursery rhyme, composed by Tom Brown in 1680


End file.
